


Play It Cool

by notsafeforowls



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: F/M, First Dates, First Kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 22:01:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18374936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notsafeforowls/pseuds/notsafeforowls
Summary: The only thing Nate had told her was to dress casually.





	Play It Cool

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Steve Aoki and Monsta X song.

  
Who chose to live on the fifth floor of a building with steep stairs and no elevator? Weird people like Nate, who had probably moved everything in using a time courier and hadn’t considered that his guests wouldn’t be using one to go to and from there, apparently.

Zari stepped around a bike that was blocking half of the stairwell and finally, finally made it up to the top floor. Okay. She fidgeted with the sleeve of her shirt as she walked down the hallway, looking for apartment thirty.

She wasn’t quite sure what to expect; the only information Nate had given her about their date was to dress casually. A shirt and jeans were casual enough, right? She’d been tempted to check with someone, but the idea of asking Sara or Charlie, and having to endure their knowing looks had been too awkward, there was no way she was asking Ray because he was a romantic idiot and would probably try to get her to dress up, and she didn’t know Mona well enough to feel comfortable asking her anything. The closest Zari had managed to get had been asking Mick if he thought she was going anywhere. He'd just glanced up from the pages he was editing and said 'no' before he'd gone back to staring at the parts he'd scored out with a red pen. Which either meant that Zari had achieved her goal of looking casual, or he hadn't even looked at her properly. Zari had chosen to believe it was the former, even if Gideon had claimed it was the latter.

Gideon had also given her some advice that Zari was alternating between trying to scrub from her mind and trying not to think about too much. She knew the AI was a pervert, but she didn't need Gideon to tell her how to 'make her dreams more realistic.’

Stopping outside number thirty, Zari took a deep breath. It was fine. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just a date with Nate — they'd eaten lunch together dozens, if not hundreds of times. There was no real reason for her to be nervous. Except for the part where it was also their first date. And she had no idea what they were doing. And she'd never even been to Nate's apartment before.

Maybe she should have swallowed her pride and asked Sara or Charlie... Oh, well, it was far too late to ask for advice now.

Zari knocked on the door hard enough that her knuckles stung.

Silence.

She checked her watch, just in case she'd managed to get the wrong time. Nope. One in the afternoon. Zari was just about to knock again when there was a thud from inside the apartment.

“It's open!” Nate yelled, his voice muffled by at least one closed door.

Well, then. Zari opened the door slowly, checking behind it to make sure that there wasn't anything there to trip over. The only thing in the narrow hallway was a single box of books that Zari recognised as being from Nate’s room on the Waverider. They'd been in the same box since Zari had met him, and she wasn't sure they'd ever made it out of it. Some of Zari's nerves vanished at the sight of them. That was familiar, even if the hallway with its pale lemon walls wasn't.

“I can't believe you still haven't unpacked those books. When was the last time you even looked at them?” Zari checked the top few just to make sure. Yep, they were the same ones that had been beside Nate's door on the ship. College textbooks, probably, since they looked nowhere near as well-loved as most of the other ones Nate had either acquired before he joined the team or taken throughout history. “You should give them away.”

“I can't give them away! They saved my life in college, they're a good luck charm.”

“Didn’t you once break your little toe on the box?”

“Yeah, but they have sentimental value, too. My friend Thomas traded an extra copy of one of his physics textbooks for the entire box because I didn’t want to ask my dad for money. And that textbook was worth four hundred bucks because it was out of print, so I really can't get rid of them.”

Zari laughed as she reached the end of the hall and opened the door to what she hoped was the living room. “Oh, you're the kind of person who keeps birthday cards, aren't you?”

“You don't?” Nate asked as the door swung open, but Zari's answer – that it was hard to keep something as sentimental as a birthday card when you were always on the run - died somewhere between her brain and her mouth as she took in the sight before her.

The living room was larger than Zari had expected it to be, with a three-seater couch in the middle of the room, facing a green wall that contrasted the white ones. There were few signs of any personal touches in the room, other than a few books on the floor beside the couch.

Nate was standing on the other side of the room, trying to adjust a television that was mounted on the green wall without removing it from the bracket. He had a screwdriver in one hand, and was trying to support the TV with the other. But that wasn’t the strangest thing about the room. No. The strangest thing was the twelve other televisions set up on almost every available flat surface.

“I know you're a movie buff, or whatever, but isn't this taking it a bit far?” Zari managed eventually, stepping over a couple of the many extension cables to help Nate hold the TV until he’d finished messing around with the bracket and Zari was reasonably confident that it wasn't going to fall and smash its screen. She turned around to take another look at the ridiculous number of TVs and –

Wait.

Zari took a few steps closer to one of the TVs, looking at the console that was hooked up to it. Or, more specifically, the box beside it. Was that what she thought it was?

“You said you always wanted the play the original,” Nate said quietly as Zari picked up the case for Metroid, “and I got pretty much every single console that was made when I was a kid – because I couldn't play sports, and then because I'd usually ended up in hospital again – so I had a look through some of my old stuff from my parents' place and found most of the ones you wanted to play, and most of my favourites as well. I thought it would be a good first date. Well, that and pizza. I've got all the other consoles set up, too.”

A silence settled over the room as Zari stared at Nate. She only half remembered the conversation; they'd been sitting on the beach in Aruba, half of the team trading stories about their lousy childhoods and the other half looking more depressed by the second, and she'd mentioned that her parents had tried to get her games on the black market whenever her birthday had come around, but they’d never been able to get Metroid for her, and she'd never had the heart to get Gideon to fabricate her a copy because she wanted the real thing.

And Nate had remembered. Not just that she wanted to play the game, but all of the other stupid things she'd mentioned, judging from the look of the other consoles in the room and the games stacked beside them. There were even a few of those weird controllers that Zari had specifically mentioned wanting to try (even if they looked like torture devices.)

It wasn’t just any copy, either. It was his.

Affection bloomed in Zari's chest, chasing away the nerves that had been lingering in the pit of her stomach.

“We can do something else,” Nate said quickly, obviously misreading her silence. He reached for the box Zari held. “We can go out to dinner, or do whatever you want to do. This was a—”

Zari finally found her voice, holding the box out of his reach and grabbing his hand to stop him in his tracks “Great idea. Really. This is a great idea, Nate.” She squeezed his hand lightly, watching the bright, pleased smile slowly replace his unsure expression. “I was just surprised that you remembered. This is, uh... The nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. Even as a date.”

Not that there had been a lot of dates. But the few Zari had been on hadn’t been like this. They hadn’t been personalised with little things she’d mentioned in conversations, like that ridiculous looking Terminator controller. Or that one that they’d joked about sounding like a sex toy — a great way of multitasking, she'd said, and Nate had laughed, and Ray had looked scandalised.

“Well,” Nate said quietly, rubbing his thumb across the back of her hand, “you deserve to have nice things done for you, especially as a date.”

Zari was suddenly very aware that they were standing in the middle of the room, holding hands. Staring at each other. And, looking at the way Nate's lips quirked up more at one side than the other, the surprising shyness in that smile, Zari really wanted to kiss him. Even with the alarm bells ringing in the back of her mind, the old ones that told her not to get too attached to people because something bad would happen to them.

The moment broke when Nate blinked and took a few steps back, still holding on to Zari's hand loosely – or maybe she was holding on to his more now, or maybe it was fifty-fifty – as he gestured to the consoles.

“Come on,” he grinned. “I even have Mario Kart so I can finally kick your ass.”

The alarms stopped. Zari laughed.

“Nate, if you ever beat me at Mario Kart, I'll dress up as Sara for Halloween.”

 

*

 

The remains of the pizza had gone cold in the box hours ago. Zari was happy to say that she’d beaten a few of Nate's high scores and times on a ridiculous number of levels, and briefly sent him into hysterical laughter when she'd looked up some cheat codes and couldn’t work out how to undo them when they looked ridiculous.

She wasn’t sure how many games they'd played, separately or together - they'd taken turns playing and watching, and then taken turns with a Spyro level they both hated until Zari had managed to get to the platform – but it was definitely the kind of number that would get judgemental looks from Ray 'don't look at the screen for too long, take breaks' Palmer. They'd moved on to Mario Kart after finishing as much of the pizzas as they had been able to eat, stretching out on the floor in front of the couch.

Zari had, as she'd known she would, beat Nate on every single level, pushing him back to second place. He was the best player after Jax, but even Jax hadn’t been able to keep up with Zari.

But now it was the grand finale. Rainbow Road. Zari and Nate's favourite level (and everyone else's least favourite.)

“Oh, no you don’t,” Zari leaned hard to the side, shoving herself right up against Nate until they were shoulder to shoulder, trying to throw off his concentration so that her attack worked. It did. Princess Peach went flying off the edge.

“That’s cheating!” There was no real heat behind the words, though; Nate was trying not to laugh.

Zari tried to get a better look at his face without looking like she was looking. That was a nice expression, the way that Nate tried to keep himself from laughing only made his dimples much more obvious...

By the time Peach was back on the course, Nate was in last place, with Zari's Bowser out in front. Just barely, though. It turned out that Rosalina wasn't just too close for comfort when Zari played with Mick or Mona. Zari was so busy trying not to get knocked over the edge that she almost missed Nate getting a box.

Oh, fuck.

Sure enough, the exact thing Zari was expecting popped up. A blue shell. Nate shot her a smirk as he started to gain, climbing to fifth place in seconds.

Right before the next set of boosts, Nate released the blue shell. Zari could only watch as the shell flew over the other characters, right towards Bowser. And then Zari noticed what else was happening. Nate was catching up — and fast.

“Oh, no way,” Nate said as he obviously came to the same conclusion as Zari had.

Sure enough, Nate caught up to her side at the wrong moment, right in the middle of a jump, right as the blue shell hit Bowser. Bowser and Peach both plunged down.

They both stared at the screen for a few seconds before Zari started laughing.

“Did you just blue shell yourself?”

“Nooooo.” Nate buried his head in his hands, his Wiimote falling to the floor between his knees. “Oh my God, I can't believe I did that. I'm Ray.”

Really, only about half the team was safe to play Mario Kart with. The other half was absolutely terrible at it. Charlie hated losing. John got bored and left halfway through. Ray always hit his own traps.

Zari dropped her own Wiimote on the couch and scrambled on to her knees, leaning against Nate's shoulder, patting him in a way that wasn’t quite sincere.

“You’re Sara.”

“Take that back!” Nate lifted his head, looking genuinely distressed. “She drives into walls. And off the edge. Every single time!”

Zari leaned forward until they were almost nose to nose. “Never.”

The other characters had crossed the finish line. Rosalina had won. Bowser and Peach were just sitting there. But somehow, despite all the times that Zari had enjoyed winning, she didn’t really care if Bowser even crossed the finish line.

Instead, she slipped one hand around the back of Nate’s neck, watching the way that his eyes widened and his lips parted slightly as he realised what she was about to do. Zari didn’t give herself time to hesitate or second guess herself before she leaned in and closed her eyes.

It wasn’t the neatest kiss ever. Their noses bumped together a little, the angle was kind of weird with Nate sitting and Zari kneeling to his side, and Nate's teeth caught on her lower lip for a split second. But it was slow and gentle, Nate bringing one hand up to cup Zari’s jaw, and so sweet that something in Zari's chest unspooled.

Zari pulled away slowly, her cheeks burning. But when she opened her eyes, Nate was smiling at her, his cheeks tinged pink.

“I’d been trying to find a good time to do that all afternoon,” Nate admitted, brushing his thumb lightly across Zari's jaw. “I thought about doing it when you managed to get to that platform using all the ramps, but then the pizza arrived.”

Typical delivery. They never arrived early when you wanted them to. Zari let herself copy him, enjoying the warmth of Nate's skin under her fingers as she stroked her thumb across his pulse point. She could feel his heart beating quickly, probably even faster than her own.

Zari checked her watch. She'd mentioned to Gideon that she would be back before eleven, and she still had over an hour to go. And she'd never really had the opportunity to make out on the couch when she'd been a horny teenager. Zari tilted her head at the couch, hoping that Nate understood and she didn’t have to ask if he wanted to make out on the couch until she left.

“Unless you have anything else on the way that might interrupt us.”

From the look on Nate's face, he understood exactly what Zari meant.


End file.
